How Andy Jassy Plans To Keep Amazon Web Services On Top Of The Cloud

John Furrier
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Echoing the longtime philosophy of his boss, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Jassy added, “We’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Jassy and AWS have built a much larger business in the cloud infrastructure market than anyone else. According to a past report by Gartner, AWS is bigger than the next 14 cloud providers combined. Those estimates don't seem to be slowing down in 2017.

AWS’s business growth is on a more than $18 billion annual run rate, growing 42% a year. Many are reporting that Microsoft, Google, and Oracle are nipping at the heels of AWS. Jassy insists they’re confused. “Comparing growth rates alone without looking at the [baseline] revenue number isn’t apples-to-apples and to be growing 40% on an $18 billion revenue run rate is very unusual.”

Large Businesses Migrating to the Cloud

The trend of cloud is rapidly transforming information technology from on-premises computing and software approach where organizations must assemble and manage the resources themselves in datacenters they’ve bought or leased to the new way, cloud computing where businesses rent instead of buy computing, software and services and the cloud provider manages all the undifferentiated heavy lifting for the underlying infrastructure. As more businesses make the move to the cloud, they’re flocking to AWS, providing the money the cloud company can reinvest into launching new services and features every day.

Four years ago in an interview, Jassy told me that in the future, all companies will eventually be in the public cloud. So I asked him this year if he still stands by that prediction -- and he hasn’t backed off at all.

“If you look at what's happening in the enterprise and the public sector over the last two to three years, it’s exponential and dramatic for AWS,” he says. “You can see it in really every imaginable vertical business segment. So it's not like these enterprises are running just a couple applications. We have an $18 billion revenue run rate. You don't have a business that big just on startups. We're just at the beginning of mainstream enterprise mass migration to the cloud.”